One view held within the mobile industry is that the operators had their chance at selling mobile apps but flunked it, and would be better off leaving it to platform owners like Apple and Google now. Another view – unsurprisingly that held by most of the operators – is that the sheer size of the app store catalogues is giving them a second bite of the cherry, bringing some curatorial discipline to the crowded market.

Vodafone is certainly in the second camp. It has launched its own content channel within Google's Android Market in the UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, with Greece, Ireland and Portugal to come. The channel will highlight Vodafone's own range of apps and services, as well as picking out news, sport, information and gaming apps, with a promise of regular exclusives and price discounts.

"Together with Google, Vodafone has made it really simple for customers to get to the essential apps they can trust," says the operator's group content services director Lee Epting. More than 75 million Vodafone customers around the world are regularly using the mobile internet, and we are committed to giving them the best possible experience. This focus on quality over quantity helps deliver on that commitment."

Quality over quantity. Those three words neatly summarise the operators' pitch to clamber back onto the apps bandwagon. Games developers in particular may raise eyebrows at Epting's quote, remembering a time when the operator portals were the dominant channel for mobile entertainment, but where tightly managed quantity did not always mean better quality. Vodafone has already flopped publicly in the apps era too, with its Vodafone 360 initiative.

Apple has neatly shut operators out of its iOS apps ecosystem, although they are able to launch their own apps for customers on its App Store. Google has proven more accomodating, with operators able to launch their own independent Android app stores, or take their own slots within Android Market on devices they sell to their customers. In the US, both Verizon Wireless and AT&T have opted for the latter, and now Vodafone too.

In early July, AT&T gave a hint at what may lay ahead for Vodafone by announcing a partnership with social games publisher Zynga. The latter will customise some of its games exclusively for AT&T's Android Market channel, although exact details of that customisation are somewhat vague – it could simply involve a few exclusive virtual items.

For its part, AT&T will be promoting these games in that channel, while also promising to "improve the social gaming experience through network and battery life optimisation". A few years ago, operators were mighty gatekeepers in the mobile content industry, but announcements like this do not dispel the feeling that now, deals with app developers can be as much about coolness by association.

That is not to say that the operators' desire to become bigger players in the apps world should be treated with disdain. Smartphone users will increasingly need help navigating through hundreds of thousands of app choices, and their operator's channel on the app store preloaded on their handset may be a logical place to start.

Operators can also play a valuable role working with developers to open up their internal APIs for apps. This blog's sponsor Telefonica has been pushing the latter idea with its BlueVia initiative, to increasing interest from its rivals.

Even so, the greatest impact that operators have on the apps space will not be with their own channels on Android Market or with their APIs. They still set the pricing and limits for mobile data tariffs, and have been rowing back from offering unlimited data at precisely the point at which app usage is surging among their customers.

Research by Nielsen in June 2011 found that the average US smartphone user consumed 435MB of data a month in the first quarter of 2011, up from 230MB a month in the same period in 2010. With fair-use data caps of 500MB not uncommon for smartphone buyers, operators's biggest impact on apps will come not through selling them, but from how they charge the people who use them.